Sanjay Gupta branches into TV with Monday Mornings

At first glance, the names David E. Kelley and Sanjay Gupta make an odd pairing.

Kelley, a former self-described “recovering attorney,” is one of television’s most prolific and critically lauded writer-producers, with a long list of generation-defining credits that goes back to 1986 and L.A. Law.

Gupta is CNN’s chief medical correspondent, a practicing neurosurgeon and assistant professor of neurosurgery at the Emory School of Medicine, at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital.

Gupta is also a special correspondent for CBS News and 60 Minutes. He writes a rotating column for Time magazine and his books Chasing Life: New Discoveries in the Search for Immortality to Help You Age Less Today and Cheating Death: The Doctors and Medical Miracles that Are Saving Lives Against All Odds made the New York Times bestseller list.

Last March, though, Gupta tried a different tack, a novel, Monday Mornings, about the lives of five egotistical surgeons at the fictional Chelsea General Hospital in Portland, Ore. Gupta based Monday Mornings on the side of medicine patients — and TV watchers — rarely see, in which talented surgeons gamble with patients’ lives. Monday Mornings’ central thesis is that every time surgeons operate, they’re betting their skills are better than the brain tumour or shattered heart valve in front of them. Often, they’re right — that’s how they got to be where they are. Sometimes, though, they are wrong. And when they’re wrong, who pays the most — the grieving patient’s family, or the brilliant surgeon suddenly forced to accept the fact that he, or she, may not be as brilliant as they thought they were?

The best surgeons, Gupta says, learn through their mistakes.

It’s a belief Kelley was familiar with from his years writing the Emmy Award-winning hospital drama Chicago Hope. When Kelley read Monday Mornings in book form, he saw its potential as a series. More important for Kelley, Monday Mornings was different enough that he realized he’d be mining new emotional ground. Kelley and his longtime director, eight-time Emmy nominee Bill D’Elia — one of those nominations for Chicago Hope — compared case notes with Gupta, and a new TV drama was born.

“I had reservations at first because I had done a medical show before,” Kelley recalled. “But when I met Sanjay and read the book, I saw it was quite different. The characters were different. The stories were different. It has a very rich tone, and I wanted to keep that voice.

“Any series, at some point, becomes a community. It’s one of the things I love about television. You become a team. And to have Sanjay Gupta at the centre of this team, as a leader on this project, has been something special for all of us.”

Each week’s episode revolves around one of the most closeted and secret traditions in modern medicine: the surgeons’ post-mortem get-together, dubbed the morbidity-and-mortality conference, in which the doctors meet in private, question each other, offer opinions and try to get to the bottom of a recent medical mystery. The surgeon who has just lost a patient explains to his peers what he did and why, then faces their at-times withering cross-examination. The sessions are chaired by the hospital’s chief-of-medicine in a university lecture hall, and the stakes are high. Egos are on the line, and careers are broken or made.

“These meetings really do happen,” Gupta said. “Very few people know about them. These were some of the most indelible experiences I think I’ve ever had in my life, when I was training to be a surgeon. It is so raw. It is so candid. It is so human. You shut the doors. The administrators aren’t invited. The lawyers aren’t invited. This is about the doctors holding each other accountable. And what you find is that doctors hold each other accountable in ways that are probably harder and better than anyone else can do it. In the quest to become as good as you can be, this is what it takes.

“These meetings are not about lawyers or administrators. It’s doctors on doctors, colleagues on colleagues. It’s about learning. Because the worst crime of all would be that a mistake happens and no one talks about it; no one learns from it. Here, as unsettling as it is to think about, we get to see how mistakes happen. We get to see how these mistakes, these complications, these unexpected outcomes get discussed openly and how everyone hopefully gains something from it.”

D’Elia, who directed Monday Mornings’ pilot episode, recalled a moment during filming when Gupta, there to supervise a scene’s accuracy, went off-script. It was a moment D’Elia never forgot, and it changed the show for good.

“There was a moment in the pilot where I was thrilled with the take,” D’Elia said. “Jamie (Bamber) was operating on someone’s brain. And I turned around and Sanjay looked depressed. I told him, ‘Hey, that was great. We got it.’ I said to him: ‘What’s wrong?’ And Sanjay said, ‘He just killed him.’ Then I got depressed.

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile